Staff DevOps Engineer

Here's what you'll be doing:
We're looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer to join our team. In this role, you'll have significant technical responsibility within a Platform Engineering team which consists of another 7 engineers and supports core elements of our Internal Developer Platform (IDP).Reporting into the DevOps Engineering Lead, this role will be central in delivering change and strategy in an agile and transparent way to the Internal Developer Platform (IDP). The role requires a team player who is highly technical, organised and a passion for excellence. You will provide clarity on the PEST roadmap and priority of work which will align to the business needs and IDP goals. You will be hands-on in terms of delivering new features for our IDP and internal PaaS. We're looking for someone who is:

• Mentor, and Develop: Provide expert technical mentorship to grow the team's skills and careers.
• Set and Execute Technical Vision: Partnering with our DevOps Engineering Lead you will design, architect and lead the implementation of our infrastructure roadmap.
• Systemic Improvement: Identifying system-wide bottlenecks, technical debt and inefficiencies; proposing solutions that result in significant improvements to developer productivity, security, reliability and cost.
• Champion a Modern DevOps Culture: Drive our principles of automation, self-service tooling and a "you build it, you run it" mindset.
• Complex Problem Solving: Remain hands-on and excelling at identifying and solving the most ambiguous, high-impact technical problems. 
• Elevate the Developer Experience (DevEx): Act as a key architect for our IDP, treating infrastructure as a product.

As our Staff DevOps Engineer, you'll:

• Set and Execute the Technical Vision, partnering with the Lead to design, architect, and lead the implementation of our next-generation infrastructure roadmap.
• Elevate the Developer Experience (DevEx) by acting as a key architect for our IDP, treating internal infrastructure as a core product offering.
• Provide Expert Mentorship, offering technical guidance and coaching to develop the team's skills and actively grow the careers of our engineers.
• Drive Systemic Improvement, identifying organization-wide bottlenecks, tackling technical debt, and proposing solutions that boost developer productivity and reliability.
• Champion a Modern DevOps Culture, driving our principles of automation, self-service tooling, and fostering a "you build it, you run it" mindset.
• Lead Complex Problem Solving, remaining hands-on to diagnose and resolve the most ambiguous, high-impact technical problems across the platform.

A few tasters of our recent roadmap:

• Adding GPU backed instance support to our ECS clusters to deliver a 10x improvement in inference time for our AI workloads.
• Adding 'rainbow deployments' to our existing blue/green and red/black options. This allows our Engineers to deploy multiple versions of their codebase to the live environment to allow real time A/B testing of new features.
• Changing our 'golden images' for AMI's and containers from Amazon Linux 2 to Ubuntu and successfully rolling this out to hundreds of instances and thousands of containers with zero downtime. And just to make it more challenging we simultaneously shifted from a x86 to an ARM architecture.
• Adding auto injection of secrets to our instance and container runtimes to reduce the cognitive load of managing them per app and improve security by centralising standards.
• Building a tool to auto-generate IaC as part of the CI/CD pipeline using a DSL like definition of the required infrastructure elements.
  

An insight into our Internal Developer Platform:

• Developer Portal: Backstage
• Version Control: Github
• AI Pair Programmer: Github CoPilot
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Cloudformation, Ansible
• Container Management: Docker
• Continuous Integration: Semaphore
• Continuous Deployment: - Github Actions / AWS CodeBuild / Bespoke tooling
• Binary and Artifact Management: Nexus
• Observability: New Relic (Log Ingestion, Application Performance Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring)
• Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services (ECR, ECS, Bedrock, Fargate, Lambda, Route 53……), Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Azure
• Database: MongoDB Atlas, AWS Aurora Postgres
• Message Broker: Confluent Kafka
• Web Application Firewall: Cloudflare

For the Staff DevOps Engineer, the challenge isn't just maintaining systems—it's treating reliability and velocity as architectural products. If the idea of engineering 'rainbow deployments' for A/B testing, migrating thousands of containers with zero downtime, and using AI to auto-generate IaC excites you, then you belong here. This role offers the scope, complexity, and autonomy required to move beyond incremental change and truly redefine what high-performance infrastructure means for a modern software organisation.
(We know it's tough, but please try to avoid the ​​confidence gap​.​​ You don't have to match all the bullet points above to be considered for this role.)
We encourage people of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. We are committed to maintaining an inclusive, supportive place for you to be you and do your very best work.
Apply Today

About Simply Business
We insure small businesses and enable big dreams – not just for our customers, but for our people and communities too. With over 1,000,000 active insurance policies, we protect builders, bakers, landlords and more than 1,200 other trades.
We're a technology company as well as one that sells insurance. That means we build, we fail, we learn and we improve. We're a B Corp too, which recognises our strong track record of having a positive impact on people, society and the environment.
Why not check out our advert on YouTube: Simply Business TV advert 2024: 'Simply the Best'

What are the benefits of working at Simply Business?
We offer a great work-life balance where every team member has a manageable workload and the flexibility to work hybrid. 
On top of the 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays), we offer leave that suits your needs. Plus the option to buy five more days of holiday with your flexible benefits. 
Our flexible parental leave allows you to approach an important time how you want – with six months full pay to the primary caregiver and four weeks full pay if you're the secondary caregiver.
Our life event leave is an extra days leave every two years for those big moments in your life like moving house or your birthday. And as a thank you to our long-serving employees we offer a two week paid sabbatical after five years of service, then four weeks off after ten years of service.
And our core benefits can put your mind at ease with private medical insurance through BUPA, that covers any pre-existing condition. And a health cash plan that covers your everyday medical expenses.
We also make sure you're compensated fairly with a competitive salary based on your experience and the market we're in. Plus the potential to earn an annual bonus based on performance.
There's access to the tools to support your personal development with programmes on our dedicated learning platform. As well as support for your mental health with access to counselling. 
We'll match what you put into your pension up to five per cent. And pass on a tax-free sum that's four times your basic salary with our life assurance policy, with the option to increase it to ten times through our flexible benefit scheme
Our salary sacrifice car scheme gives you the option to buy a brand new, fully insured, and maintained car for a convenient fixed monthly amount taken from your gross salary (after 6 months service).
And our flexible benefits scheme gives you an allocated amount to use each year on benefits like critical illness cover, dental insurance, travel insurance, or a gym membership.
Ready to join us and drive our success as a high-performing team? Apply today.

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